L’Rain Album Reviews

Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek comes from a family entwined in the music business – her grandfather ran a jazz club and her father worked in record label marketing. Like Sade, L’Rain is both Cheek’s stage name and the name of her eponymous band. L’Rain is derived from her mother’s first name, Lorraine.

Introduction

L’Rain describes her music as “approaching songness”. It’s an appropriate description for her fragmentary songs, which contain disparate elements of neo-soul, gospel, psychedelia, and avant-garde.

Cheek’s looped vocals and field recordings are important aspects of L’Rain’s sound. But she’s also a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, bass, keyboards, and percussion.

While it’s experimental and fragmentary, L’Rain’s music is often pretty, with moments of beauty shining through.

L’Rain Album Reviews

L’Rain

2017, 8.5/10
L’Rain’s self-titled debut is named for her mother, who passed away during the album’s gestation. L’Rain’s music is nuanced and there’s far more than grief, but the shadow of her mother is present on the record. It’s most clear on ‘July 14th, 2015’, a voice message of her mother singing her happy birthday. L’Rain is a mere 28 minutes, but it’s so dense with ideas that it feels much weightier.

When clear moments coalesce, L’Rain is gorgeous. ‘Stay, Go (Go, Stay)’ is lovely with its organ and saxophone. The sparkling guitar arpeggios of the opening ‘Heavy (But Not In Wait)’, while ‘Stay, Go (Go, Stay)’ has a beautiful ascending vocal melody. Sometimes it’s more cryptic – ‘Alive and a Wake’ is closer to a sound sculpture than a song, while ‘A Toes (Shelf Inside Your Head)’ features pitch-shifting and a section that sounds like a gospel choir speeding into oblivion.

L’Rain is dense and complex, but its beauty rewards close attention.

Fatigue

2021, 7.5/10
Fatigue is the second album from Taja Cheek. On her website, she writes “With a release date in 2021, the timing of Fatigue is not coincidental. Collectively, we are navigating the immense and looming figure of unremitting fatigue brought on by the ongoing pandemic, mass death, continued violence against Black people at the hands of the state, and the mountain range systemic problems obstructing safety and security for the people that need it most.” Fatigue mines similar stylistic territory to L’Rain’s debut – basically it takes in influences from everywhere. But it’s even more fragmented than before – fourteen tracks race past in half an hour, often more like unrealised snippets than fully-fledged songs,

Fatigue is deliberately discombobulating – the opening track is an immediate head trip with its sudden pockets of silence. But there are stunning tracks dotted among the sketches – ‘Two Face’ rides an accessible beat and a tinkling piano riff, while ‘Find It’ features some typically gorgeous vocals. The interludes often upset the album’s momentum – of course, a purposeful tactic – but the production from L’Rain and Andrew Lappin is gorgeous.

Fatigue certainly isn’t predictable listening, but there are awe-inspiring moments of grace and beauty along its winding routes.

I Killed Your Dog

2023, 8/10
On her third album, L’Rain still incorporates found sounds, taken from field recordings, into her work. And she still hurtles through tracks at a breakneck pace. Her use of brief interludes means that sixteen tracks go by in less than forty minutes.

But there are also differences. There’s more of a rock influence than before, dialling back the experimentation a little. The record reflects her own experience playing in guitar bands, with L’Rain playing most of the instruments. ‘Pet Rock’ has a guitar-heavy sound, more accessible than before.

Even when she’s weird, L’Rain throws up plenty of moments of beauty. They’re even more prevalent on this more mainstream record. ‘5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)’ is lovely with its stacked vocals. The title track is stripped back and lovely, with its gentle electric piano. The closer, ‘New Year’s Unresolution’, successfully dips into dance beats.

Even making music that’s inching closer to normality, L’Rain’s vision is still unique and lovely.